


superfund

by liv nb (greencacti)



Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, Stream of Consciousness, Tour Bus, frank just wants 2 be a spice girl
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2019-08-14
Packaged: 2020-08-23 11:33:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20242171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greencacti/pseuds/liv%20nb
Summary: “Frank’s goal was always to smell like baked goods, which was why he wore little girl perfume. To be fair, the ylang ylang, lavender, and sandalwood scents sold at department stores didn’t really suit him the way Sweet Strawberry by Claire’s did, but Gerard had to wonder if it was fucked up to find it hot when Frank smelled like he just came back from a birthday party at Build-A-Bear.”Gerard’s ruminations on dating the prettiest boy in the world. A modern tour AU.





	superfund

**Author's Note:**

> more of a stream-of-consciousness series of vignettes set in a 2019 tour universe than an actual story with a coherent plot. i'm trying out a new style with this so apologies in advance if it doesn't ~flow~ lol

Frank didn’t like to sleep in his own bunk, but he had always loved decorating it. Gerard thought it originated from the fact that his mom had never let him decorate his room growing up, maybe. He needed his own space - not in the sense that he wanted time away from Gerard, because he never really did. More that he needed a place where he could be visually represented. Frank liked tangible evidence of his presence - that was why he always wore so much perfume, so that the shirts he borrowed from Gerard would come back smelling like cotton candy and vanilla and everyone would know he had worn it. There was never a question of whose bunk was the one with the fluffy pink throw blanket, the collection of Hello Kitty stuffed animals lined up under the window, the shelf full of glittery lipglosses with names like Snob and Nymphette and Super Orgasm. 

If people could reincarnate from inanimate objects, Frank must have been a sundial or clepsydra in a previous, ancient life. Time moved strangely on tour, even more strangely than it usually did - Gerard stopped trying to keep track of days and hours before the first leg was even over - but Frank needed order and organization in his saccharine bubblegum cocoon. Somewhere between Hartford and Philly he had acquired a Sanrio calendar and hung it on the wall by his pile of pom-pom throw pillows with a stripe of floral washi tape. May had featured some penguin-looking character that Frank apparently didn’t like, but he made a delighted noise on the first of the month when he flipped to June. “Aww, it’s Cinnamoroll!” he announced. “He’s my favorite.” He leaned underneath his bunk to grab his diary and immediately started scribbling something in it.

Mikey stared at the calendar for a long moment. “Okay, what kind of animal is Cinnamon Roll even supposed to be? I literally can’t tell.” 

Frank scoffed, not even glancing up from what he was writing in his diary, a composition notebook with a photo of a young Britney Spears mod-podged to the front. “It’s not _Cinnamon Roll_. It’s Cinnamoroll. He’s a dog. And a pisces.” Sometimes Gerard wondered what he wrote about in there, what secret thoughts he found important enough to encrypt in his unreadable curly script. This was a boy who openly talked about how he still sort of wished he could’ve been a teen mom - what did he have to hide? But there was no way would Gerard ever ask to read it. Even Frank, who secretly wanted to be a housewife and iron Gerard’s shirts and bake him pies and have his babies, had limits.

Frank had always had calendars around, and had always had the same system of denoting days when something important was going to happen - a big star drawn in the center of the date. His logic was that he would see the star and remember he was supposed to do something. In school, it had been writing a paper or studying for a test. Gerard didn’t know what Frank was planning for these days, but he was still drawing in his felt-tipped constellations. Cinnamoroll would smile encouragingly as he watched Frank Sharpie in solar systems of obligations.

“What the hell even is that?” Bob asked his one night when he saw Frank crouched on his bunk, staring thoughtfully at the calendar like he was calculating something. “Your period tracker?”

Frank gave him a disgusted look - everyone knew Princess Prude didn’t like to talk about bodily functions - at least, most of the time he didn’t. Frank wouldn’t even say the word _ bathroom _ out loud because of the unhygienic implications, but simultaneously thought getting a facial was hot and kept a running list on his phone of lipsticks that could survive hookups (the latest - Revlon’s “Kissable Pink” could; MAC’s “New York Apple” couldn’t). It was complicated. Like, “It’s Complicated” Facebook relationship status-level complicated. “No. I wouldn’t put that out in the open. There’s an app for that, didn’t you know?” 

Bob made a face. “Why would I know that?” He paused. “Why the fuck do _you_ even know that?”

“It comes in handy, you should try it out. You get PMS pretty bad when it’s your time of the month.” Frank drew in another star on his calendar. “And what I’m doing is marking days where I remember something good happening last year, to see if something good happens again. I’m trying to figure out which days are lucky.”

Gerard shook his head. It must not have been easy to be a professional manic pixie dream girl.

* * *

“We should do life soundtracks,” said Frank one night, scrolling through his labyrinth of Spotify playlists. He had a playlist for absolutely any situation. Songs for when you were depressed and felt like wallowing, songs for when you were depressed but wanted to feel better. Halloween songs that weren’t Monster Mash or Thriller. Angsty girl group ballads. Joni Mitchell’s greatest hits. Music for when life got too difficult and you wished you could escape to the 1980s suburban midwest. Everything. He made them mostly for his thousands of tweenage admirers, who were constantly asking him for music recommendations. Out of everyone in the band, Frank definitely had the most little fan girls, which kind of made sense. He was someone they could connect to. He put his star-shaped tattoo stamps on one cheek at a time just like they did. They would try to wing their glitter eyeliner like he did and tweet at him to ask what perfumes he wore. Frank felt a strong sense of social responsibility towards them; he had, practically overnight, become the cool older sibling to a whole slew of aspiring alt girls, and he wanted to do right by them. He imparted his big sis wisdom onto them - _ under no circumstances should you wear Victoria’s Secret Love Spell body spray; make sure you have them match you to a foundation shade the first time you buy it, don’t try to match yourself; carrying a Michael Kors Selma bag makes you look like a shoplifter, just trust me _ \- and made them playlists to make sure they were being introduced to the magic of Bjork, The Cure, and Slayyyter.

“What’s a life soundtrack?” asked Bob, full of skepticism. “Is this one of your scrapbooking things again? Are you sure you’re only 23? You have the hobbies of a geriatric.”

“Hey,” said Ray, “Those scrapbooks were cute.” In the van days, when they were too broke to even afford camera phones, Frank’s method of documenting their life on tour had been creating collages out of whatever paper memorabilia he could cobble together from each place they went. He had albums full of brochures, set-lists, and letters from fans, all artfully arranged with the name of the city they came from spelled out in tiny rhinestones. Scattered throughout was the odd Polaroid, if had they encountered someone who had a camera, and Frank would write the date it was taken punctuated with little hearts in the white space at the bottom. It had been pretty precious.

“No, it’s not a scrapbook thing. Life soundtracks? The songs that made you the person you are today. Like they used to do in the magazines,” Frank clarified.

Magazines didn’t used to be so expensive. Gerard kept a stack of them in a pile underneath his bunk, but they were all old, dog-eared back issues that had the bands that raised him on the covers. They were there for nostalgic purposes. A don’t-forget-your-roots thing. He was lucky to have come up when he did, in the halcyon days right before the economy plunged into the void - if Kerrang had been $7 a pop back when he and his crew of junior high wastrels would loiter at CVS for hours after school, no way could he have afforded to grow up goth.

Frank had come up on a steady diet of indie girl mags, the ones that were progressive before Cosmo knew how to be, and their influence on him was still prevalent. One article he had read in middle school had recommended Secret Scent Expressions deodorant in the scent Va Va Vanilla, and he had never been without it since. It was a godsend for someone who was obsessed with smelling like Christmas cookies, and, frankly, for the rest of the band, too, since someone actually smelling _ good _ was a refreshing change of pace. Everyone stunk like sweat and death coming off stage after a show - everyone except Frank, who would float backstage with the scent of cake and candy wafting behind him.

Frank’s favorite articles had been a tie between ones where celebrities dissected the contents of their purses, and ones called “Life Soundtracks” where people shared playlists of the songs that had shaped them as people. Bob, apparently, just couldn’t grasp that concept. “I have way too many to make one playlist. Where would I even start?” he lamented. “Like - did you know I lost my virginity to Teach Me How to Dougie?”

“Yeah,” deadpanned Mikey. “We all knew that. I’ve been trying to forget.”

“I’m, frankly, still not totally convinced it’s a true story,” added Frank. “Do we have any concrete evidence you’re not still a virgin?”

A few days later, “LIFE SOUNDTRACK: FRNKIERO” appeared on Frank’s Spotify account, a set of eleven songs with a still from _ The Simple Life _ as the playlist cover to set the tone.

  1. _ Paparazzi - Lady Gaga_
  2. _ Unpretty - TLC_
  3. _ From the Bottom of my Broken Heart - Britney Spears_
  4. _ Girls’ Room - Liz Phair_
  5. _ I’m With You - Avril Lavigne_
  6. _ Fallen Angel - Poison_
  7. _ Beautiful - The Smashing Pumpkins_
  8. _ The State of Dreaming - Marina and the Diamonds_
  9. _ Video Games - Lana Del Rey_
  10. _ All the Things She Said - t.A.T.u._
  11. _ Boys Don’t Cry - The Cure_

* * *

Frank still wasn’t over the fact that he was born too late to be a Spice Girl, and compensated by behaving like it was still 1998. He owned a pastel blue CD player with a plastic figurine of Hello Kitty dressed like an angel affixed to the top, and would pop in Bjork or the Smashing Pumpkins on low volume when he couldn’t sleep at night. It was his white noise. Gerard liked forest sounds; Ray liked crackling fire; Mikey liked Native American spiritual chants; Frank liked _ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. _

He wore melon-scented body glitter he bought off of Ebay from the long-discontinued Art Stuff line at Bath and Body Works. Like, long, _ long _ discontinued - at least fifteen years, maybe more. Ray had sat him down and asked him if he was at all worried about putting roll-on glitter that had likely been rolling around since they were in preschool on his face. “Seriously,” Ray said, “Mold. Mold is a thing that exists.”

Frank, who kept his makeup in a shiny pink plastic Caboodle and unironically wore Lip Smackers lip balm as a full-fledged adult, was unbothered by the prospect of body glitter-induced ringworm. Neither hell nor high water nor risk of fungal infection could stop him from channeling his Sparkly Spice persona. Gerard understood it. Certain eras just called to you. Gerard, personally, lived for 90s grunge and got kind of bitter when he thought about the fact that if the band had been around during MTV’s peak Riki Rachtman moment, they totally would’ve been featured on _ Headbangers Ball_. Like that syrupy old doo-wop song went - _ oh why, oh why was it my fate to be born too late? _

That understanding was why he didn’t think anything at first of Kelli, a skeletal-skinny peroxide blond member of the tour’s opening band who looked and dressed like he wandered on board straight from 1987. Gerard usually got along with everyone on tours. He was like the archaea that thrived in extreme environments; suburban normalcy made him nervous. The idea of even setting foot in Whole Foods on a breezy weekday afternoon made him feel queasy. Yoga moms and golf dads always looked at him like he was a trespasser on their sacred land. They acted like his mere presence was a violation of an unspoken territory agreement, an infraction punishable by being drowned inside their Hydroflasks. _ You stay out of here, and we’ll stay out of Hot Topic. Got it, freak? _

Tours were dirty and loud and kept you up all night, but the people were understanding when it came to alternative lifestyles. You expected to encounter tweakers and drop-outs and general societal outcasts, so a guy who existed in a permanent 80s glam reverie was par for the course as far as Gerard was concerned. But Gerard changed his mind pretty quickly on that when he realized Kelli was trying to move in on _ his boy. _

Kelli liked to linger in Frank’s presence like a fog - lounge on Frank’s bed, wrap his arms around Frank’s shoulders, skulk behind Frank when he walked, drop his voice and whisper in Frank’s ear. He always followed Frank with his eyes like a cat waiting to pounce on a mouse. Or like Frank was one of his little sister’s baby dolls, one that he couldn’t wait to break.

Frank thought Kelli was cute. Kelli was originally from somewhere in Scandinavia and spoke with a thick accent that conjured images of old world grandmothers stirring dark stew, and Frank found it charming. Kelli was pretty, Frank explained, the way a glass doll on a shelf or a crystal glinting in the sun was. Just something to look at, not to touch. 

Gerard had - kind of, sort of, _ okay _ \- always been the jealous type, and he didn’t like the idea of some Euro-transplanted sugar waif thinking he could share what belonged to Gerard. And anyway - all Kelli really wanted was to fuck Frank, and Frank was a forever yours, love you so much, can’t live without you kind of person. It made Gerard’s blood boil to know anyone was thinking about him like he was just something to use and throw away.

Frank rolled his eyes whenever Gerard brought it up. “Please,” he’d say, a huff escaping out of his glitter-glossed lips. “He doesn’t see me like that.” Frank didn’t think anyone saw him like that. He told Gerard once that he thought there was hierarchy for the words you could use to describe someone attractive - _ cute _ being the lowest, then _ pretty _ , then _ beautiful _ , with _ hot _ being reserved only for people who you felt sexual attraction to on sight. “Like,” he explained, “guys who I see and I wanna suck them off ASAP.” Gerard had given him a look. Frank had given him one right back. “What? You were one of them!”

According to Frank, the highest level he felt he could be on was _ pretty _, but the way Kelli looked at him with hungry eyes when he told Frank how good he smelled as he put on perfume begged to differ. Gerard wanted to tell the dude to eat a fucking sandwich.

“You know he buys that shit at Claire’s?” Gerard interjected when he overheard Kelli telling Frank how _ nice _ he smelled. Frank was sitting on his bunk, holding a pink plastic basket full of body sprays in scents like angel food cake and warm vanilla sugar. Frank primarily wore little girl perfume. To be fair, the ylang ylang, lavender, and sandalwood scents sold at department stores didn’t really suit him the way Sweet Strawberry by Claire’s did, but Gerard had to wonder if it was fucked up find it hot when Frank smelled like he just came back from a birthday party at Build-A-Bear. 

“So?” asked Kelli, curled up like a cat on Frank’s pink bedspread. “_ You _ don’t think he smells nice?” He gave Gerard a slow, shifty-eyed smile. Kelli was always high out of his mind, so he did everything slow - but he was still coherent enough to know when he was getting under Gerard’s skin. Gerard didn’t feel bad for disliking Kelli, because Kelli didn’t like him right back.

“I just thought you should know,” Gerard said in a voice that sounded snippy even to his own ears.

“_Gee_,” said Frank in a warning voice. He always said Gerard’s temper came from the fact that he was born in the year of the snake. Frank believed in that stuff, kind of. He liked to blame any and all questionable behavior of his own on being born in the year of the rooster - after all, you couldn’t expect someone with a cardinal animal so irritable to be rational. “Don’t be a bitch.” All Gerard could think was that Frank wouldn’t be saying that if he knew what Kelli had said about him when he wasn’t there. It was enough to make anyone see red. Even roosters. Especially snakes. 

Mikey thought Gerard’s irritation was funny. “You’re really threatened by that guy? Dude. Come on,” he said when Gerard retreated from the bunks. He smirked. “You know you’re hotter.” Mikey never laughed out loud at Gerard, but his knowing expressions did it for him. The nonverbal dig - that was Mikey’s modus operandi.

Gerard, frankly, _ didn’t _ know if he was hotter. Kelli had a feminine face, almost Kate Moss-esque, but Gerard sort of did, too. Frank thought Kelli’s Nordic features were delicate and dainty and envied them. He would say he was going to bring Kelli with him when he finally got the nose job he had long dreamed of, and tell the surgeon to give him a nose that looked exactly like Kelli’s. Gerard didn’t think Frank needed a nose job, but there was no changing his mind about one of the perceived flaws he obsessed about. Frank counted and logged every calorie he ate, painstakingly maintained the shape of his eyebrows. Gerard got it - Miss Alt Scene’s Sweetheart had an image to uphold - but he wished Frank didn’t get so down on himself for not being perfect.

“I’m not threatened, I’m just saying he should back off. I guess in Scandinavia they think it’s cool to homewreck.” Gerard sounded whiny even to himself, but he couldn’t help it - he was just used to being the only and most important star in all of Frank’s cutesy domestic daydreams. Kelli didn’t deserve a boy whose sexual fantasy was baking his man banana bread. He wouldn’t even know how to _ appreciate _ it. 

Frank was girly girl at heart and hadn’t had a lot of male friends growing up. He just related better to girls on that level. Guys, in his mind, were for flirting with, giving hard times to, borrowing clothes from, sleeping curled up next to - he didn’t have a great handle on the concept of male platonic relations. As an adult, he kept guy friends, but Gerard had overheard him admitting to a friend from back home on the phone that he could hypothetically see himself dating all of them. “I used to think, when I was a kid and all my friends were girls and they would say they could never see themselves with one of their guy friends - like, why not? You already like him!” The friend on the other line had made a noise of agreement. “Right? And I still feel that way! Not that I want to date all my friends, or anything - just that I _ could._” He had paused for a moment. “Except Bob. No way. 

So with that in mind, it did kind of feel like crossing lines when Kelli would smirk when he heard Frank’s Hello Kitty Converse sneakers squeaking up the bus aisle, but Frank didn’t discourage it. Gerard kind of thought Frank was keeping this whole Kelli thing up just to bother him, because he thought it was cute when Gerard got mad. He loved a guy in charge. He told Gerard once that he thought some scenes in _ Karla _, a movie about the fucking Ken and Barbie killers, were hot because the male character was so controlling, which was undeniably totally fucked. It kind of made Gerard wonder if the wires in Frank’s brain that programmed fear and lust got switched by accident. Or something.

* * *

When you spent hours and hours on a bus - especially one with vents like theirs, that made voices carry like smoke on the wind - with the same people, you learned things about them. Not necessarily anything bad. Just things you wouldn’t know otherwise. 

Most of it you didn’t mention. Like, Ray was afraid of the dark - or something. He always slept with his phone flashlight on low power, just bright enough to keep his bunk illuminated in a blueish-white glow. Gerard didn’t judge - he had nightmares sometimes, cold sweat visions that made him thrash around in bed and sent Frank tumbling into the aisle, ones he was sure everyone knew about but also knew not to bring up. They all had been there. Whatever Ray’s deal was, whatever he had to do to feel comfortable enough to sleep on a bus that made potholes feel like volcanic explosions, no one was gonna say anything. Willfully ignoring everybody’s weird quirks was the only way to get through tour without major bloodshed.

Some shit, however, _ was _ worth bringing up. Like when they were sitting around the tiny table next to the tiny fridge in the bus’s tiny kitchen area, and telltale gargling sounds started emitting from Bob’s laptop. “Dude,” said Ray, poking his head out from where he was rooting in the fridge. He slammed the fridge door shut and looked at Bob like he wished he could crush him in it. “You are _ not _ fucking watching beheading videos right now. It’s, like, 9 A.M.”

Bob had had a deep and abiding fascination with the Iraq war for as long as Gerard had known him, and could sit unflinchingly through videos of insurgents decapitating people. Sometimes Gerard wondered if coming into existence at such a tumultuous moment in history did something, collectively, to everyone his age, the way that living through the depression had plagued a whole generation with lifelong food insecurity. It would have made an interesting longitudinal study. If someone had wanted to argue that growing up post-Columbine, post-9/11 had desensitized the new generation of adults to violence, Bob’s weird obsession with the Iraqi insurgency would have made for some pretty compelling evidence.

“Listen,” said Bob, holding his hands up defensively, “It’s interesting. I don’t know what you were all doing in the golden age of internet snuff, but once you’ve seen Mr. Hands, nothing phases you anymore.”

“_The golden age of internet snuff_,” repeated Gerard. 

“Who the fuck is Mr. - “ Ray began, then stopped himself. “You know what? I don’t wanna know.” He closed his eyes and took a long swig of some health drink that was a menacing shade of green, like he was hoping it could cleanse him from the inside out of the bad energy Bob was channeling onto the bus. A roadie that had traveled with them at one point had been a big believer in feng shui, chakras, third eyes, and all the ways negative vibes could wreck havoc in your life. Gerard hadn’t really bought into it back then, but being trapped in an enclosed space and forced to listen to people being beheaded - he could see how that shit could be detrimental. Their chakras were probably collectively totally out of wack. 

“Oh, yeah, I remember that. Mr. Hands. The guy who got fucked by a horse and died,” said Kelli, who always drifted in and out of the conversation. He only really liked Frank and never even vaguely attempted to feign interest in anyone else (unless it was to try and cause problems with Gerard, who was _ totally _ above that, thanks). He would hover like a ghost on the bus, a taciturn presence that would stay silent for long, long periods of time - until he suddenly decided to join the conversation with casual commentary about fucking zoophilia, apparently.

Frank was sitting on the couch, doing his makeup in a heart-shaped compact. “That is so sad. I’m putting on blue mascara to represent how that makes me feel.” He made a face at himself in the mirror. “You are so sick, Bob.”

“Whatever. You watch Hurricane Katrina documentaries, like, every week,” replied Bob, rolling his eyes.

Frank scoffed, not even glancing away from his mirror. “That’s different.”

Frank cared less about the wars and more about the environmental disasters of their youth, both natural and manmade - when Katrina drowned New Orleans, when oil flooded the gulf, when the reactors melted down at Fukushima. Whenever he wrote his own songs, they always featured some sort of nature allegory. Frank had parts of songs - a lyric here, a chord there - strewn all over the place, written in his unmistakable curling script. They were on Post-Its, on stray pieces of loose leaf, in his little diary, with titles like “Oyster Girl” and “Climate Change”. “Freshwater”. “Fish Out of Water”. A lot about water. He said it was a Scorpio thing.

Frank’s songs were in the same vein as Gerard’s - save-your-life music. Frank wanted to create the kind of album that pulled people back from the edge, reminded them to keep living and keep hoping, and if he did ever produce it, it was going to have fucking _ layers _ . Narrative progression, recurring melodies, some kind of two-act structure - the way that Gerard always formatted albums like comic books, Frank wanted his to be like a musical, which made sense because he had been raised on them. Frank had seen more Broadway shows as a kid than most people saw in their entire lives, and it explained a lot about him. Anyone who spent entire years of their childhood listening exclusively to the _ Cats _ soundtrack _ would _ grow up to confidently sport blue mascara. 

This album, if it ever came to be, was going to be Frank’s magnum opus, and it needed a title that could effectively convey its grandiosity. He would spend hours fretting over it - coming up with names, writing them down to see how they looked on paper, asking Gerard what he thought, crossing them out, ad nauseam. His first idea had been to call it _ Seismography _ , but that didn’t fit with all the water imagery. For a while it was _ Oceans _ , then _ Coastlines _ , then _ Monsoon Season _ to be a little more fatalistic, but none of those were right, either. He had whole pages of his diary blacked out, where potential album titles that just weren’t it had been scribbled out of existence. 

One day Gerard found him sitting on the floor, diary splayed open, surrounded by cut-up back issues of Seventeen and Vogue and carefully spelling something out in rainbow glitter glue. In all caps sparkled the word “SUPERFUND”, surrounded by an explosion of confetti hearts and stars in the margins. On the opposite page was a decoupaged collection of magazine images of deer and baby ducks juxtaposed against a mushroom cloud. Frank had drawn halos over each animal’s head in yellow glitter. Magazines, Mod Podge, glitter glue, and crafty little odds-and-ends like pom-pom balls and bits of ribbon were never in short supply with Frank. He had experimented with a lot of mediums - oil paint, darkroom photography, terrifying dolls made out of dried apples - but he really considered himself, Gerard thought, to be a mixed-media artist. “That’s pretty,” said Gerard, peering over Frank’s shoulder. “What’s a Superfund?” 

“My album title,” said Frank dreamily, fanning air on the page to help the glue harden. “I finally came up with the perfect one.”

Superfund. Gerard felt like he had heard that term before; it sounded kind of familiar. “What’s it mean?” 

“It’s the government program that cleans up sites that have been contaminated with hazardous waste,” replied Frank, sounding like he was reading from someone’s 9th grade earth science textbook. “The really bad ones, ones that take years and years to clean - like, the ones that seem impossible to ever restore - those are called Superfunds.” He smiled down at his page, and it glittered right back up at him. If Frank had been an anime character, his pupils would’ve turned to diamond-shaped sparkles right then. “That’s what I want my music to do - to remind people there’s nothing time can’t heal. You know?”

“Yeah. I know,” said Gerard. If he were an anime character, _ his _ eyes probably would have gone heart-shaped. Maybe even his whole head would have.

* * *

The night before Frank’s wallet got stolen in Vegas, a fortune teller predicted it. It had been a good wallet, Frank’s most prized estate sale find: a faded Chanel wristlet, rosy pink with flowers embossed into the leather. Frank said he had always figured it was fake, but a Google search of the serial number had seemed to indicate that it might have been real. But now he’d never know, because it was gone.

Gerard had never really been that big on Vegas. He appreciated, on a conceptual level, the idea of a place that existed only to indulge people’s vices, but it was so cartoonish and manufactured that he started to feel sick if he was there too long. It was like gorging on too many elephant ears at the circus. It must have been exhausting to live there - life through the funhouse mirror. 

Frank, on the other hand, loved Vegas, and it made sense. If Vegas were a person, it _ would _ be Frank - it was half this make-believe world, suspended in cotton candy and fried dough, and half something darker, harder to define. That kind of dichotomy existed in Frank, too. At a glance, Frank seemed so simple and lighthearted - sticking heart-shaped rhinestones to everything he owned, humming “Marshmallow World” to himself - but underneath the (possibly fungal) body glitter he flecked across his cheeks, Gerard knew there was a lot going on. 

(Gerard was more of a Portland, or maybe a Seattle. A little different, a little funky. Constant cloud cover. Lots of rain.)

Going to the psychic had, unsurprisingly, been Frank’s idea in the first place. Bob, as always, had been unsupportive. “Dude. You know they just make all that shit up,” he said when Frank suggested they use some downtime on an off day to visit _ Olga Clairvoya _ , who ran a fortune-telling studio a few blocks away from the next night’s venue. “You’re really gonna pay money to get played by some hag named Olga?” He snorted. “I bet Olga isn’t even her _ real name.”_

“First of all,” Frank began, rolling his eyes, “it won’t cost any money because I found an offer on Groupon.” Of course the thrift store diva had managed to find a coupon for a psychic. Gerard couldn’t even be surprised. “And second, obviously it’s fake, but it’s fun. I wanna ask her if I’ll ever find a banana split charm for my Juicy charm bracelet.”

So they had gone, except for Bob, who had stayed back in protest. Olga, a wrinkled woman in a glittering shawl, ended up being even less legitimate than most tourist trap clairvoyants - she apparently used the whole fortune-telling schtick mostly as a vehicle to sell essential oils that she claimed had healing properties. She spent the majority of the time they were there trying to convince Ray that a zit on his chin was indicative of some unresolved conflicts, and that he needed the Forgive oil to help him find inner peace. But she did “predict” one thing before they left: that something precious of Frank’s would go missing.

When they got off stage the next night, sure enough - Frank’s purse had disappeared from the dressing room. Bizarrely, the thief left the items from the purse that they apparently didn’t want in a neat pile by the mirror: a heart-shaped tin of Altoids, a bottle of pineapple-scented hand cream, a few oxidized pennies. But the wallet had apparently been deemed worthy enough to be stolen, because it was gone. Frank was frantic and buzzed around backstage enlisting everyone in a search party for his Chanel baby, but the trail was cold.

“She’s gone,” Frank said glumly, slumping onto a couch in the green room. “My baby.” He opened his tin of Altoids and popped one into his mouth. “First my Dior bag, and now this! Totally seems like an inside job.” He cast his eyes towards the ceiling, looking deep in thought, like he was trying to remember if any of the roadies seemed particularly suspect.

“Maybe one of the makeup girls took it,” considered Ray. “I swear, I’ve lost more shit in the last year on tour than I have in every other year of my life combined.”

That sounded about right to Gerard. He vaguely remembered reading somewhere that, back in the day, when one of the members of Guns N Roses would be hooking up with a girl, the rest of the band would steal all the shit from her purse, and that anecdote really did encapsulate the gritty reality of life on the road. You kind of just expected shit to go missing, be it stolen, accidentally left behind, or inexplicably vanished into the ether. One of Frank’s other most prized possessions, a vintage cream-and-pink Dior bag that he had saved forever to get, had been stolen by _ someone’s _ groupie - there was still some debate over whose. Mikey, in his really bad times, had gone through a phase of selling other people’s shit for drug money, so anything had been liable to disappear back then. Ray - an entire _ person _ \- was infamously once left behind at a rest stop, and no one noticed for, like, a good half hour. You lost stuff - that was tour life. 

Mikey plunked down next to Frank and slung his arm around his shoulder. “Polly Pocket, I hate to say it, but I think karma finally caught up to you.”

“Polly Pocket” had been Mikey’s nickname for Frank for years. Everyone called Frank by cutesy pet names, the kind you called tiny kittens or puppies, maybe because he elicited the same emotional response a cute little animal would in someone. When people saw a puppy they felt an immediate need to baby it, to call it sweetheart and angel, and Frank was like that too. If he were a dog, he would be a Havanese mutt mix, part pure and part something unidentifiable. A dog abandoned at the pound, but adopted right away. Easy to love, high maintenance to take care of, might bite if pushed too far.

Bob called him Beanie Baby because he thought it was funny that Frank was 23 and still loved stuffed animals. Kelli called him Angel Food because that’s what he smelled like (seriously, Gerard wondered, what was _ up _ with this dude’s scent fetish?). Gerard called him lots of things, but Frank liked Sugar and Princess the most. Mikey’s Polly Pocket thing came from when he and Frank used to shoplift together.

Frank had been a total klepto in his younger years. Not some casual drugstore bandit who would pocket lipsticks for the thrill, either - no, Frank had been a premeditated and masterful thief. He knew everything. Lush and Bath and Body Works didn’t have cameras, so as long as no one saw you conceal, you were clear. Ulta was easier than Sephora, but both were fair game, except for Sephoras inside J.C. Penney, because those were monitored by cameras so high-def they could zoom in to see the freckles on your face. Target had a chase policy and would pursue you at all costs to get their shit back. 

Shoplifting had been Frank’s exclusive province until he convinced Mikey to do it with him, because he had come up with a new, totally infallible method - but it required two people to work. They would enter a store separately - first Mikey, then Frank - and Mikey would immediately establish himself as a person of interest to the store associates. Most of the time he didn’t even have to do anything; just his black-ringed eyes, mess of dark spiky hair, and way of skulking around when he walked were enough to set off some alarms. No one paid attention to little Frank, who would dress up in his prep school best - cable-knit sweaters, Nantucket red khakis - and glide in carrying purses with plush Rilakkuma keychains dangling from the zippers. It turned out thirteen years in rich bitch Catholic school had taught Frank something after all - exactly how to look and act like someone with money and purpose and iron-clad morals, someone who would never steal.

Everyone would be way too busy watching the tweaker in the video games aisle to realize the kid in the Vineyard Vines button-down had been an aisle over de-tagging three pairs of Beats headphones - one for himself, one for Mikey, one to boost on Poshmark. Frank’s favorite lifting purse had been a turquoise velour Juicy Couture bowler bag with the words “JUICY ANGEL” written on it in sequins - first, because it seemed like something a contestant on _ Rock of Love _ would carry, and second, because it was deceptively tiny but could hold a lot of stuff. It had room for everything he needed: Burt’s Bees chai tea-scented lip balm, boxes of strawberry Pocky, bubblegum-flavored condoms, and all the shit he and Mikey stole from Best Buy.

Ray laughed. “Man, I forgot about when you guys used to steal shit! Just for the record, I totally would’ve made you return that PS4 you stole for me it I had known it was stolen, like, at the time.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Bob. “Sure you would have.”

Frank laid his head on Mikey’s shoulder. “Maybe you’re right. You know, Olga _did_ kind of remind me of that one loss prevention lady at Target...”

* * *

People who grew up on the East Coast loved Dunkin Donuts’ coffee the way San Fran junkies loved smack. Gerard still remembered everyone who had worked at the one that had been on his drive to school in high school by name. Frank knew everyone’s orders by heart, because he was the type of person who paid attention to that shit, and always volunteered to be the one to go on Dunkin runs when they were within proximity of one. He just liked being there. One whiff of their Boston cream donuts and he was home.

It was creeping up on midnight, and they were caught at a rest stop somewhere in the endlessly empty California desert. There had been a major accident on the highway, one of the ones where emergency workers arrived with body bags at the ready, bringing traffic to a standstill in a no-exit zone. There had been nowhere to go except the rest stop, and finding one with a Dunkin on the West Coast had to be good luck anyway - the caffeine addict’s equivalent of a four-leaf clover. It was a rare and fortunate find. You couldn’t just ignore it.

So they filed in, a group of crud-eyed punks in various states of late night lounge wear. Frank had on a black hoodie with the Little Twin Stars on the front and pink Von Dutch trucker hat, radiating Paris Hilton in 2004 energy in waves. Mikey was wearing pajama pants with Kermit the frog on them and a drug rug, looking even more dead than usual under the fluorescent overhead lighting. Bob inexplicably had half his face painted like a rejected member of ICP. The dissimilarity between their ideas of what constituted appropriate red-eye garb was basically a microcosm of what life on tour with them was like. The same way you couldn’t pick your family, you couldn’t really pick your road gang - but even if Gerard could’ve, he still would have chosen that motley crew.

“Okay,” said Frank, returning from the Dunkin counter with three precariously stacked trays of drinks. “I don’t know whose shit is whose. So taste test them and find out, I guess.” A heart-shaped mood ring circled around one lavender-painted finger clicked against the plastic cups as he set them down on the sticky rest stop table one-by-one.

“Who the fuck ordered the iced milk?” asked Bob, pointing to a creamy white drink on the second level of the leaning tower of caffeine. “Must be yours, right?” Bob’s teasing always sounded like he was making fun of his little sibling.

“Oh, that’s Kelli’s. It’s like, extra, extra, extra, light and sweet. Where is he, anyway?” Frank asked, taking a sip of his own deceptively dark drink. His coffee looked bitter because he got almond milk instead of regular milk, but Gerard was sure it was still rot-your-teeth sweet from the syrupy flavors Frank always got. Usually he got plain vanilla, sometimes he branched to hazelnut. He got dreamy-eyed and wistful when he reminisced about a discontinued cinnamon bun flavor.

“Probably counting out quarters to pay you back,” said Ray, digging through his bag, a tote he had found in a thrift store in Vermont they had stopped at once. It had PROTECT DRUNK GIRLS written across the front in block letters, nestled amongst a garden of embroidered flowers. He pulled out a worn-looking wallet and produced twelve quarters, organized in neat little stacks of four. “Here’s mine, by the way.”

Being collectively broke meant that while the rest of the world advanced towards cryptocurrency and cash apps, the band remained, like insects preserved in juvenile schoolyard amber - or maybe more aptly like a comic preserved in Silly Putty - confined to swapping the same crumpled singles and tarnished quarters back and forth. Frank passed around his coin purse, a little zippered pouch in the shape of a dog’s head, and everyone crammed their $3 in loose change into it. He never made Gerard pay him back (“When you’re my babydaddy, I’ll pay for your coffee, too,” he had told Bob once when he demanded to know why Frank never accepted Gerard’s quarters) but Gerard always slipped his singles in under the table when Frank’s little dog wallet made its way to him. Frank had the energy of someone who was just born to be a sugar baby - Gerard was sure some of the guys on SeekingArrangement.com would have had field a day with a doe-eyed boy who just wanted mascara and Sanrio stuffed animals - but he had too much pride to send some dude ass pics for free shit, or to even accept sugar money from his actual boyfriend. Not that Gerard really had sugar money to give him - but if he did, Frank wouldn’t have taken it.

Kelli appeared with $2.75 and a foreign coin he claimed was worth “20 kronor”, whatever that meant. Frank thought it was cool and accepted it. “You know,” he said, turning the gold coin over and over again in his hand, “once I was at a rest stop near Laguardia, and as I was walking in I saw one car rear end another and send it totally flying through the air. It did a flip and landed upside down, and I thought for sure the person in it died. But they lived.” He took a long sip of his coffee. “It was, like, a miracle. If you believe in that kind of thing.”

Gerard took a sip of his own coffee. He definitely believed.


End file.
